Kevin Boyd's blog

Dear Senator McCain,

I'm glad you stopped by Tuesday night and decided to kick off your campaign in New Orleans (actually Kenner, but really who cares). I appreciate that you and your campaign staff were gracious enough to come visit our fine area and spend some money here to help our economy. Your speech was an excellent cure for insomnia and I thank you for helping me sleep that night.

While I'm glad that you chose New Orleans as the site to kick off your presidential campaign, I must admit, if the election was today, I would not vote for you. Don't get me wrong, I would not vote for the latest fraud from Chicago, Barack Obama either. More likely, I would decline to vote for president. However, I want to give you a chance to earn my vote so I have decided to write you this letter to give you the opportunity to speak to my issues in order to earn my vote.

See Senator McCain, I'm actually one of those conservatives you hate so much. You may have called me an "agent of intolerance" or a "bigot" or some other name when conservatives like me dared to oppose your left-wing stances on the issues. However, without "agents of intolerance" like me, you have no chance against Barack Obama. Frankly sir, I see no reason to vote for you.

Senator McCain, the only way you can earn my vote is to speak to the issues I care about. It appears to me that your main issues are:

1) Stopping "global warming" (whatever that is).
2) Amnesty for illegal aliens.
3) "Reforming" government.
4) A plan in Iraq that rhetoric aside is no different from Obama's.
5) Opposition to any drilling for domestic oil.
6) Obama's scary, so don't vote for him.

Frankly sir, I don't care about your five main issues and your scare tactics against Obama are not working. If anything sir, your issues and your stances on those issues are making me less likely to vote for you.

Now Senator McCain, here are the issues I care about:

1) The economy and more importantly, the weakening dollar
2) A grand national strategy on foreign policy to deal with the post-Cold War and post 9/11 world
3) Shrinking the size of the Federal government
4) Making America more competitive in the world economy.

In short sir, where do you stand on those issues? The only candidate who talked about the dollar was Ron Paul (though I did not support him or his solutions). Your only mention about foreign policy other than Iraq was a joke about bombing Iran. I frankly don't trust you on taxes and the size of government because you've opposed the Bush tax cuts and supported programs like No Child Left Behind. Finally, you have not addressed how to make America more competitive in the world economy by proposing deregulation and reducing corporate tax rates dramatically.

Basically sir, address my issues or I along with many other conservatives and libertarians will stay home or vote 3rd party this year. You will only have yourself to blame if the dreaded phrase of "President Barack Obama" comes to pass.

Sincerely,

Kevin Boyd

For stealing money from someone else other than the Boys and Girls Club.

The mystery man behind the looting of a Bronx charity to finance the startup of liberal radio network Air America was arrested yesterday in Guam.

Evan Montvel-Cohen was picked up by border-patrol officers at Guam International Airport on an outstanding warrant from Hawaii. He had been indicted there last month for money laundering and the theft of more than $60,000 from a Honolulu landscaping firm, prosecutors said.

"We at DOI are not surprised to hear that Mr. Montvel-Cohen was arrested on theft and money-laundering charges," said Rose Gill Hearn, commissioner of the city's Department of Investigation, which probed the looting of the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club in Co-op City.

It was Montvel-Cohen who, as development director for Gloria Wise, convinced other club officials in 2003 and 2004 to give $875,000 of taxpayer money to the radio network where he was a top executive and co-founder.

He also received loans from the club of more than $45,000 that were never repaid.

Questions: Will this story be on MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, or CNN tonight? Will Keith Olbermann give at least one segment to this story?

Mike Huckabee gave a recent interview to the Huffington Post where he outlined his vision for the Republican Party:

What can the party do to reverse course?

Republicans need to be Republicans. The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it's this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it's a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says "look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don't get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it." Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it's not an American message. It doesn't fly. People aren't going to buy that, because that's not the way we are as a people. That's not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it's just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for.

If you have a breakdown in the social structure of a community, it's going to result in a more costly government ... police on the streets, prison beds, court costs, alcohol abuse centers, domestic violence shelters, all are very expensive. What's the answer to that? Cut them out? Well, the libertarians say "yes, we shouldn't be funding that stuff." But what you've done then is exacerbate a serious problem in your community. You can take the cops off the streets and just quit funding prison beds. Are your neighborhoods safer? Is it a better place to live? The net result is you have now a bigger problem than you had before.

Just because fiscal conservatives and most libertarians oppose big government doesn't mean they want to throw people on the streets, have anarchy in the streets, and eliminate schools. Most fiscal conservatives/libertarians believe maintaining law and order is one of the very few things government should be doing. Most fiscal conservatives/libertarians believe private charity and the private sector are the most efficent means to deliver services like healthcare and education because government bureaucracies are inefficent, consume much of the resources that can be used to help the receipents, require burdensome taxation, and often do not have the best interests of the receipents at heart. Most conservatives/libertarians believe that there should be a safety net for those among us who truly cannot work or are old.

Finally, have the failures of 2006 demonstrated to Huckabee the need to include conservatives/libertarians in the GOP fold. Fiscal conservatives and libertarians stayed home or defected to the Democrats over excessive spending, government waste, and intrusive government in 2006 and Huckabee wants to continue this. More "compassionate conservatism" will not win elections for Republicans. Only a platform embodying the principles of limited government, Federalism, a strong national defense, and defending traditional values will put us back into power.

Taking Huckabee's advice would destroy the conservative movement.

Campaign Gas Gimmick Backfires

An attention-grabbing stunt by a top Democratic recruit intended to highlight the high price of gasoline instead turned into a public relations embarrassment for the campaign.

Business consultant Dan Seals, the Democrat challenging Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), held an event last week at a suburban Chicago service station where his campaign subsidized the price of gas to the same $1.85 level as it was before Kirk was elected in 2000.

What the campaign didn’t fully anticipate was the nearly two-mile long stretch of traffic created by the stunt, which hamstrung the local police force.

In the end, only 50 drivers were able to fuel at the station – with the rest sitting in traffic unable to receive the discounted gas. And the local police force sent the campaign an additional $2,200 tab to cover the price of traffic control.

Now Kirk’s campaign is accusing Seals of attempting to buy votes, with them claiming the event is a violation of federal law “by reimbursing voters’ gasoline expenses in an effort to influence their votes.”

The worse thing a candidate can do is pull off a failed stunt like this. It makes the candidate look foolish and in this case, will certainly bring a FEC investigation.

Sales of new homes unexpectedly rose last month

Sales of new homes across the United States rose an unexpected 3.3 percent in April from the prior month, to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 526,000 homes, a government report showed Tuesday.

The spike in sales confounded most economists forecasts of a sales decline last month.

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the housing crunch and will help the economy as a whole.

The Club For Growth has released an ad targeting the Lieberman-Warner Cap and Trade bill. The ad will air in Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina starting today, and in Montana starting next week.

Here's the link to the press release:

http://www.clubforgrowth.org/2008/05/new_tv_ad_on_climate_bill.php

Here's the ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZniQ0689l14

The Washington Post has a report that exposes the Ron Paul campaign's questionable financial practices.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has built a national following largely by preaching an isolationist foreign policy. Stick with your own kind, says the maverick presidential candidate.

And that's more or less what he has been doing over the past few months, putting relatives in a slew of key positions and paying them a total of $169,063, according to the latest campaign finance reports.

Paul's granddaughter Valori Pyeatt helps organize fundraising receptions and has been paid $17,157. Another granddaughter, Laura Paul ($2,724), handles orders for Ron Paul merchandise. Grandson Matthew Pyeatt ($3,251) manages Paul's MySpace profile. Daughter Peggy Paul ($2,224) helps with campaign logistics. The candidate's sons Randall and Robert and his daughter Joy Paul LeBlanc have all been paid for campaign travel and for appearing as surrogates at political events.

Who keeps track of all these finances? Paul's brother and daughter, naturally, who have been paid a combined $62,740 to handle the campaign's accounting.

Campaign aides said they discussed the possibility that involving so many family members could create the impression that nepotism was driving hiring decisions, but ultimately they saw no problem with the practice.

"You always think about those kinds of things," said Jesse Benton, Paul's spokesman and, it just so happens, the fiance of one of the candidate's granddaughters (he has been paid $54,573). "But his family is very important to him. There is something important about having a family element involved in a campaign. Having people around you that you can unconditionally trust."

The practice of Ron Paul being generious to friends and family has precident as pointed out by Doug Mataconis of Below the Beltway.

While the practice itself is perfectly legal, it does raise questions about how much of the campaign is being used to provide jobs for family members and it’s remarkably similar to the way the company that published those controversial newsletters back in the 80’s was run:

Mataconis goes on cite the following from a Reason Magazine article about the racist newsletters:

Besides Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell, the officers of Ron Paul & Associates included Paul’s wife Carol, Paul’s daughter Lori Pyeatt, Paul staffer Penny Langford-Freeman, and longtime campaign manager Mark Elam (who has managed every Paul congressional campaign since 1996 and is currently the Texas coordinator for the presidential run), according to tax records from 1993 and 2001. Langford-Freeman did not respond to interview requests as of press time. Elam, president of M&M Graphics and Advertising, confirmed to reason that his company printed the newsletters, but said that the texts reached him as finished products.

In light of the apparent nepotism of the Ron Paul campaign, the racist newsletters, the isolationist foreign policy, trade protectionism, the conspiracy mongering, tolerance for pork barrel spending, demonization of critics, and the obession with the Federal Reserve; it's clear that Ron Paul will not be the solution to what ails the Republican Party, the conservative movement, or even the country as a whole. In fact you can make the arguement, in light of today's report, that the whole purpose to the Ron Paul campaign was for Paul to use his half-baked ideas get as much of those Federal Reserve Notes he hates so much in his pocket and bank accounts, much like a cult leader.

Now whether or not Ron Paul's followers can be harnessed into a productive force for conservatism remains to be seen.....

Full disclosure: Doug Mataconis and I are co-bloggers at The Liberty Papers, a classical liberal group blog.

Co-authored by Larry Bernard

One of the major problems that Republicans face, according to the media, is a “brand” problem. Almost every generic poll that has come out since 2007 shows Democrats defeating Republicans. President Bush’s approval ratings are anywhere from the high 20s to the low 30s, at best. Which puts him on par or slightly ahead of the very congressional leaders who are now his "loyal" opposition. According to the chattering class and the Republican leadership, one of the things that Republicans must do is to “rebuild their brand”, as if the only problem the Republican party has is a marketing problem.  Many in the Republican Chattering class say "Reagan would be a Moderate" or "Reagan isn't the answer" without addressing the fact Reagan was more then a checklist of programs but was a candidate based on fundamental conservative principles and conservative answers to problems that faced America. An America that is economically weaker, facing a global generational conflict, and a society where people advocated the answer to all Social ills was more government. Reagan did not offer answers just to how those problems faced him in his day but a way we could address how those problems manifest today. Yet many people see a need for a new conservatism or a Conservatism 2.0 for a new times. Yet the same people who ask "How we must rebuild the brand" never ask fundamental questions. Where did the brand fail? How did the brand fail? However I feel the most crucial question is did the Brand fail? An old saying goes if you fail to plan you plan to fail and from the top to bottom of the Republican machine we see a failure to advance a strong and robust intellectual conservatism that the Republican party. In short they are trying to use that Brand to repackage reheated democratic party ideas. 

The Problems that Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater first articulated a conservative response to are still problems we face today, and while global Islamic terror may have replaced communism the need for the United States to stand up against a pernicious global evil is just as vital. And while we may not have stagflation the explosion of oil prices and implosion of the dollar is probably just as bad at least. But there is no arguing with the fact the Republican party as a vehicle of American conservative thought is sick. However, just as a good doctor must diagnose the reasons of the illness before the illness can be treated and just as an addict must acknowledge their addiction before they can fight it; Republicans must know how the American perceives the “Republican brand”. But often an addict is filling a psychological weakness, a fear or an insecurity, with their drug  and if the Republican party is an addict what is our drug covering for?

To most Americans, the Republican brand consists of:

• Inefficient, ineffective, and bloated government as demonstrated by the Katrina response, Medicare Part D, the TSA, the Department of Homeland Security, and general waste and boondoggles such as some of the outrageous pork barrel spending we’ve seen lately in the Farm, Highway, and Energy bills. We've seen a philosophy in government focused more on doing something, then doing something right. We've seen a governing philosophy focused on expanding constituencies at the sake of fudging the lines of ideological difference.

• Leaders in the White House have focused on making the Republican party dominant in elections for 40 years while losing the elections that were just within arms reach. Losing those elections by focusing on making people republicans down the road rather then rewarding those people who are republicans today. The result of which has lead to Republicans narrowly winning the past two presidential elections against weak candidates that should have been defeated in landslides.

• A rudderless and shortsighted foreign policy that includes the mismanagement of the Iraq War (until the Surge), The unwillingness by the Administration to make any defense to the charges by Democrats that the answers are in "negotiation" for the sake of negotiation, the tolerance of tyrannies while talking up democracy (cases in point, Saudi Arabia and Egypt), hypocritical stance on trade (Bush imposing tariffs in 2002 for political gain in the Midwest and other parts of the country and now promoting free trade) and the overall lack of a grand vision in this post Cold War/9-11 world. And when trade deals like the Dubai ports arrangement came up no attempt was made to asses the domestic political risk, or shelter an ally from negative fall out. leading to a worst of all possible worlds. Even in the War in Iraq, which symbolizes the Bush administration they spent far more time ignoring events in the war then selling the positives of the war. When the war was good you were as likely to hear it from the President and key surrogates as you were on the evening news.

• A betrayal of Federalism as embodied by No Child Left Behind, promotion of the Federal Marriage Amendment, REAL ID, the crackdowns on medical marijuana, even in states that voted to legalize it, and the Terri Schiavo case. In addition there was a lack of drive and energy in defending Federalism from a position of conservative principles, when liberals attacked it.

• And when opponents of the Patriot Act engaged in fear-mongering without backing up their attacks with facts, the administration failed to seriously respond to these challenges. At the same time, the administration failed to listen to the legitimate concerns of critics of such portions of the Patriot Act as National Security Letters, "sneak and peek", and the misapplication of the Patriot Act for non-terrorism related cases.
  

• “Bread and circuses” style of governing which puts unimportant issues on the front burner instead of dealing with the real problems this nation faces. A Republican party that has become all we hated in the Clinton Administration.

• Corruption and incompetence as demonstrated by Jack Abramoff, Alberto Gonzalez, Vito Fossella, Michael Brown, Julie Myers, Harriet Miers,  Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Bob Taft, David Vitter, and numerous other examples. And when the GOP base complained they were attacked for being "racist", "sexist", "elitist", and "out of touch"

• And when faced with all these problems and grumbling from the rank and file Republicans from the white house to congress Republican leaders still chose to continue along the same course with the same methods.

• A Republican President who was so invested in his agenda he let the congress run earmarks and pork out the door leading to a stench that even Osama Bin Laden himself couldn't cover for and led to the Republican leadership of congress being sent out on a rail.

• A Republican nominee who lionizes Republican partisans as Teddy Roosevelt as "Heroes" but has spent a career demonizing partisanship as he has spent much of his career blurring the lines of party orthodoxy. A nominee who is running on a platform that would make the average liberal Democrat politician jump for joy on such issues as climate change, immigration, and Kerry style flip flops on taxes and other important issues to conservatives. A nominee who radiates a smugness on just how much better he is then other politicians, who can never lead a movement as "Saint John"

• A Republican congressional delegation whose staffers seem more concerned with what Democrats think then what Republicans think. An example of this is when a staffer in an interview with Right Wing News attacked conservative ideas as "just recycling Reagan"

• The likely loss of many conservative voters who will stay at home or vote for Third Party candidates, especially now that Bob Barr won the Libertarian Party nomination for president, moving the Libertarian party from the Lunatic Fringe.
  

The only way Republicans can begin to rebuild the party is to admit why we have a problem and to correct these issues before we suffer even larger losses. Reaching out to Democrats on ideas like Climate Change and giving middle class children free government health care will not win us any elections. Because why would any reasonable person buy alcohol free beer when at the DNC pub it's nickel bear night with the likes of Senator Obama promising an agenda to make up for the losses of McGovern and Carter.The Republican Party needs to introduce a platform that addresses the real needs of the American people while upholding traditional Republican principles of limited government, Federalism, individual rights, and traditional American values. The Republican party needs to also address their so-called branding problem. Not only has what we have seen from the end of the Gingrich era in the house to today not been what we would Identify as "conservative" many of the republicans leading the party were those in the 70s and 80s who fought against the Reagan and Gingrich agendas of conservatism. The five main issues addressed in this election cycle need to be healthcare, the economy, foreign policy, energy, and government reform.

The next post will lay out some policy proposals and grade the four standing GOP proposals; Newt Gingrich’s plan, the official NRCC plan,  John McCain's Platform , and the Republican Study Committee’s plan. And then we will ask the Question: Do we need a new release of Conservatism or does Conservatism 1.0 just need a new patch. Or is it that the hardware has been defective? Have we lacked the courage to be Conservative or have our leaders lacked the courage to be conservative? Because if anything has lead to this problem between how the public perceives the GOP brand vs the value the brand has held for so long its clear that Republicans have not fought to make that disparity small.